Posted
by
ScuttleMonkey
on Friday October 23, 2009 @02:29PM
from the accepting-patches dept.

Barence writes "PC Pro has got its hands on Acer's Aspire One D250 with both Windows 7 and Google Android installed. Anyone who's played with an Android phone had better get ready for a let-down: Android is far from ready for netbooks. The review laments the lack of a proper Marketplace, the poor implementation of both the inbuilt browser and Firefox, and the general pointlessness of it all in its current incarnation as a quick-boot alternative. Yes, it will get better, but at the moment it's hardly going to lure people away from even Windows 7."

Who would have expected that a slipshod port of a system designed for one human interface mechanism would fail on another? They even left out important features, what could possibly have gone wrong? Does this mean that my plan to port Bash to my wristwatch will be unpopular in the marketplace?

Seriously, though, this seems like completely unsurprising news. Just slapping dead-stock android on something(without even bothering to include features that are standard on smartphones, like the app mechanism), while giving no thought at all to the differences between a touchscreen and a touchpad, seems like an invitation to failure.

I doubt that Google had netbooks in mind when they released Android. Keep in mind that they have announced ChromeOS to be their operating system for netbooks (and possibly over time more powerful machines as well), and it should be pretty clear that Acer's experiment had very low chances to succeed anyway. However, if ChromeOS and Android somehow use compatible app markets, that might be interesting...

From the article:"Indeed, where Android's browser makes sense on a smartphone's touchscreen, it just doesn't translate here. The process of clicking and holding the left mouse button, while pushing up to scroll the page down, seems clunky and counter-intuitive,"

Gosh, they took an OS designed for a touchscreen and tried a simplistic hack to make it work with a touchpad... and this isn't easy to use? Well, duh. This says nothing about Android and everything about the marketing folks that messed up.

Do you mean you can't connect to ebay, craigslist, or google shopping? What is a marketplace in relation to an operating system on a computer?

the poor implementation of both the inbuilt browser and Firefox

I presume this means built-in browser?

and the general pointlessness of it all

When did things need to have a point to be featured on slashdot? It wasn't that long ago there was a front page story here about running linux on the kindle. Though if you want a point in the general sense, try:

in its current incarnation as a quick-boot alternative

Because that is probably all the more point a lot of people need from it.

This doesn't have a damn thing to do with Android. Android was not made for laptop computers. Properly implemented on a cell phone, MID, or PMP, Android runs exceptionally well, is intuitive, powerful, and fun. Acer is the problem here. I don't understand why companies take something like Android or Linux and implement it so poorly as to be practically worthless. Seriously, if you're going to do it, do it right.

Look at Apple, they took BSD and made it into something beautiful (not that it wasn't beautiful before). The implementation job they are doing is awesome. There is no reason at all why some other company can't do the same thing other than either gross incompetence or just not giving a shit.

market because people don't have fixed expectations as to how a smartphone UI will look, feel, and act, and expect to have to dig through menus or the instruction manual to do anything over and above simply making a phone call.

Netbooks look enough like "real" computers that people expect the UI to look and feel like a computer UI, not a smartphone UI.